“Better is a book than stone chapels in the west...." Egyptian wisdom texts

We can smell immortality in the pages of undying books. And yet... we die. Ancient Egyptians believed in the potency of texts in securing their eternal survival. Words were sacred whether on underworld pathway scrolls for the soul in Books of the Dead, in inscriptions on tombs, on statues or in temples... Words were objects of power. Hieroglyphs were divine.

(Excerpt) “And these glyphs in the Stela, what makes them so potent?” she said. “Hieroglyphs were never just a writing system," Anson Hunter said. "They were divine words. It’s for this reason that the scribes were fearful that certain words could have a malignant power and become uncontrollable forces in the tomb and so they would cut off the head of a lion in a glyph, or truncate a serpent or show spears stuck in the back of a crocodile in order to render it harmless. The hieroglyphs in the Stela of Thoth were the most potent of all. When spoken they were not just sounds, but glyphs graven on the air, real things and entities, image-meanings that took shape and activated a world of unseen forces and alternate reality. Heka, or Egyptian magic." “So you believe Egyptian magic has power to influence the real world?” “Can a certain sequence of words and actions, such as imitation, the replication of a name, image or mythical event produce an event in the real world? I believe there is an unseen connectedness between things and by tuning in to this network of likenesses you can attract like outcomes. The trick is to find that invisible skein and draw on it, hence the Egyptians’ use of puns, analogy, mimesis, acrostics, dualities and the like. These links are things beyond logic, like the dream realm where parallel sounds, symbols and stories, while seeming bizarre, hold an inner, often unseen connection with our lives.” (‘The Ibis Apocalypse')

Ancient Egypt is not about to rise again and "clobber us", or so Egyptologists assure us. Even though the remains of the pharaohs have survived the aeons and the peculiar lustre of eternity still clings to the remnants of Egypt's past. Ancient Egypt is a dead civilization, they say. Yet the ancient Egyptians did believe in supranormal power - smiting rituals and execration texts, expressed through pottery, papyrus, bone and architecture. Remote killing was a state instrument of power. The priests would write execration texts on the sides of jars and then utter the words of threat formulae, before ritually smashing the jars in order to bring enemy nations to their knees. Nobody doubted that enemies of the state would weaken or simply be flattened, knocked down dead as if by an atomic blast. Archetypal smiting scenes, with accompanying texts, show kings giving clutches of foreigners a final smash on the head with a diorite mace, one of the most common motifs of pharaonic power. These were not just pieces of wishful propaganda, although they were certainly that too. They were detonations, esoteric armaments. In fact, the ancient Egyptian firmly believed that the power of such imprecations could reach out beyond temporal boundaries and smite across the ages. Life and death in Egypt fiction:- In the footsteps of his murdered archaeologist father, his son Anson Hunter, an independent archaeologist, visits the murder scene in the tomb of the ancient Egyptian Vizier Mereruka in Saqqara.

(Excerpt) This was where it had all ended for his father and where a bigger mystery had begun. Someone came out of the shadows to silence his father’s voice. He’d paid for his theories of the afterlife with his own life, died right here on these steps in front of the statue of the Old Kingdom Vizier. What a contrast, Anson reflected. A man of the ancient world stepping forward in confidence, affirming his belief in survival after death, while at his feet lay a man of the twenty-first century who expected oblivion… who was right in the end? Anson threw a glance to the columns bearing reliefs of Mereruka. The striding figure seemed beyond time and decay. The Hittite, Greek, Persian, Roman and British empires had all come and gone while the Vizier had continued to move steadfastly through eternity. It was a reminder that the Egyptians really believed, he thought. People were wrong to imagine that cynical priests pretended to believe and merely went through the motions when they presented offerings and prayers and burnt incense in front of this door. They believed unshakably in an afterlife. They lived in an age where humankind and gods, the living and the dead, and the forces of good and evil, existed side by side in two parts that held the universe together. In today’s age that denied god and laughed at the devil, people could not see both sides. But they needed to believe in the light and the shadow and to hold both in their minds, not least the shadow. The shadow gave things shape and form. Without it there was just blinding, unrelieved glare like the sunlit desert outside. Was Mereruka’s afterworld a physical place? Or just a different reality, a sort of virtual world created by a civilization’s collective unconscious and sustained by its religion? Mereruka did not question its existence. ‘Do I believe in survival after death?’ Anson asked himself. ‘Perhaps not, when I think about it. But what about when I don’t think about it, but merely feel it, at a deeper level?’ Everyone knew that the Egyptians were preoccupied with the afterlife, but they took it even more seriously than many imagined. Humans, they said, were the only creatures that must live life with the knowledge that one day they’re going to die and our culture was the world of distraction we create around ourselves to shield us from this knowledge. But the Egyptians’ culture did not serve as a mere distraction to the pitiless cruelty of death. Instead their culture came to grips with death in an attempt to overcome its tyranny. This doorway and statue, the glowing underworlds of the tombs, the Books of Coming Forth By Day, or the Book of the Dead as they called these religious texts - were the results of government-funded research into the ‘first mystery’- death and the afterlife. The early pyramids were like nationally financed space-shots designed to launch the god-king pharaoh into the hereafter. The Egyptians even had maps showing the routes to the underworld painted on the bases of coffins. The unconscious psyche believes in life after death Carl Jung asserted. Anson recalled that the doctor and founder of analytical psychology had written of a near-death experience after a heart attack and had reported a spiritual existence outside of his body. The images of the afterlife carved on the tomb walls around him urged Anson to believe. But the veil of mystery remained. (The Smiting Texts.)

We can see and touch the solidity of immortality in the stone pyramids, columns and text-covered tombs of ancient Egypt. And, if we have a faith, or wrestle with one, we can also sense the survival of the ‘I’ within us when we sit inside the sacred space of a church or cathedral. Immortality is where it all converges for me - in ancient Egypt with its monumental beliefs in an afterlife, in Christianity with its promises of eternal survival, and in writing, which holds the faintest of all chances of survival.

Words were living things in ancient Egypt.